Lake watch. Education.

Lengthening Strike Shows Few Signs Of Ending

Happy days have yet to return to Round Lake Unit School District 116, with the strike by teachers and support staff trudging through its third week.

Parents continue to put the pressure on both the school board and the union. And even though both sides have been talking with some regularity, nothing has happened.

The lethargic pace of negotiations and the rhetoric being dished out from both sides have some people wondering whether the board is telling the truth about its finances and whether the union is being unreasonable with its long list of demands.

But perhaps what they should be wondering is how things got so bad, and why things weren't worked out sooner.

School board members say negotiations have been bogged down not just because of monetary issues but also because of the 200 items brought to the table in March by the Education Association of Round Lake, which represents some 400 teachers, teacher assistants and secretaries.

Representatives from other unions, labor experts and even members of the Round Lake union have admitted that the number of contract issues is high. But they also believe that the impasse may be indicative of a school system plagued by years of troubled relations with its employees.

"What it really means when (union officials) come to the table with so many issues is that problems are not being solved over the years prior to the expiration of the contract," said Stanley Rosen of the Chicago Labor Education Program at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

"Then what happens is it all builds up and comes out at negotiations," he said. "If you can take care of some of these problems beforehand, the bargaining tends to be much easier and more focused."

"Easy" does not describe how things are done in Round Lake, though, where contract negotiations have been notoriously arduous and bitter. The last two teacher contracts were ironed out just short of strikes. Secretaries, who organized nearly 1 1/2 years ago, haven't gotten their first contract. And bus drivers were nearly replaced with subcontracted labor before an accord was reached in June.

The current negotiations have been going on for seven months, and more than a hundred items remain unsettled.

"Usually by the time you are at a strike situation, both sides have prioritized their situations and demands and gotten down to the nitty-gritty about what is on the table," said Marty Malin, a professor at Chicago Kent College of Law who specializes in labor issues.

The union and the school board can hardly agree on what the key issues are these days. The board lists about eight key items, and the union's list is closer to 40.

Negotiations are typically an adversarial event, but the danger can be that one side or the other loses sight of what is at stake-the educational future of the district's children.

In the case of Round Lake, it's the future of some 5,200 students.

"If you look upon collective bargaining as a problem-solving process with shared responsibilities, it works very well," Rosen said. "But if you look at it as a win-loss situation and feel that you must win everything, things don't work so well, and it only cause more problems down the line."